Street food residency settles down around the corner from Smokestak There’s a well-worn, well-thumbed playbook to opening a restaurant in London serving a previously unknown, or at least little known, cuisine. Choose a name that sounds suitably ‘exotic’, yet isn’t too hard to spell and is preferably based on one of your chosen cuisine’s landmark …
Banh mi and grilled meats galore If you’ve had Vietnamese food in London in the last decade or so, then you’ll know the drill when you walk through the doors at any one of the capital’s umpteen Vietnamese restaurants. Pho, summer rolls and perhaps a coffee or two. Endless identikit curries, salads and fried noodle …
But don’t tell that to the Nuno Mendes fanboys Update 10/4/18 – added a few new sentences to the conclusion. When you’re one of London’s most feted chefs, responsible for smash hits like the Chiltern Firehouse and Taberna do Mercado, then there’s only one thing left for you to do. You open a secretive supper …
It’s tempting to dismiss Brat out of hand before you’ve even laid eyes on the place. It’s situated above the newly relocated Smoking Goat in Shoreditch, which makes it sound like the hospitality equivalent of a grubby bedsit or a suffocating flatshare. The kitchen is headed up by Tomos Parry, formerly of the lauded Kitty …
Not quite the Barrafina 2.0 you were hoping for I try not to write too much about the personalities in London’s restaurant business for many reasons. But when two of the people behind Barrafina, the capital’s landmark tapas mini-chain, strike out on their own then I can’t help but sit up and take notice. Nieves …
The Manor transforms into an Italian It’s tough times for restaurants with household names and independents alike having to close up shop all across the country. Skyrocketing business rates, a continuing staffing shortage, rising wages, intense competition (especially in London) and, in some cases, overaggressive expansion and impatient investors are all playing their part in …
Unapologetically Sichuanese hotpot Shuang Shuang, the Chinese hotpot restaurant married to a conveyor belt, befuddled many of its Chinatown neighbours when it first opened. Comparatively expensive with somewhat unadventurous ingredients, a bit too much logistical fuss on your part and a relative lack of large communal pots for group dining, it broke all the Chinatown … Continue reading
The Chisou empire’s Great Portland Street outpost Of all the London restaurants to have closed in the past year or two, few have wounded me as much as the unexpected closure of Ten Ten Tei. That budget Soho restaurant wasn’t perfect. Aside from the iffy service, one of its chief sins was its smorgasbord menu … Continue reading
Slumming it in Mayfair for South Asian haute cuisine giggles Pitting Gymkhana against Indian Accent seems like such a natural thing to do. Both are pricey high-end Indian restaurants on the same street in Mayfair, located mere yards apart from each other. And yet the outcome almost seems like such a forgone conclusion. In one … Continue reading
You couldn’t pay me to eat here again. People like to sneer at hipsterish restaurants and bars in Shoreditch and Dalston. They’re seen by many as faddy, shallow trend-chasing establishment serving up fare that’s incomprehensible and inedible to ‘normal’ folk. I have little time for such half-baked nonsense, preferring to judge each establishment on its … Continue reading
Picklery not gimmickry. The sweet life. Keep it sweet. A sweet deal. Sweet as honey. Sweet as pie. Our understandable preoccupation with sweetness and sweet foods is so deeply ingrained that the word itself has become a synonym for all that is desirable and good in the English language. But this has also blinded us, … Continue reading
In this case ‘casual’ means ‘cheaper’. Sort of. It’s always fascinating to see what happens when a lauded, Michelin-starred fine-dining restaurant launches a ‘casual’ spin-off. When Dabbous attempted it, the result was the very different and somewhat odd Barnyard. Both of those restaurants have now closed and, in retrospect, Barnyard felt a somewhat patronising, phoned-in … Continue reading
2017 has been an incredibly hectic year for London restaurants, even by the frenetic standards of this city. Despite the closure of some much missed favourites, new restaurants have continued to open at a dizzying and surely unsustainable pace. Some of that has been driven by a modest influx of celebrity chefs from abroad – … Continue reading
